Adopt a Star, Help Fund Science

This image shows a small portion of Kepler's full field of view, and includes an eight-billion-year-old cluster of stars 13,000 light-years from Earth, called NGC 6791. A non-profit organization not affiliated with NASA is offering members of the public the chance to "adopt" these stars.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

A new program offers people a chance to "adopt"
one of the stars in a catalogue of targets where scientists hope to find Earth-like
extrasolar planets.

For $10, members of the public can select a star to adopt
from the catalogue, and receive an e-mail certificate and updates if any
planets are discovered around their star. All the money raised goes toward
funding scientific research on the stars.

The stars up for adoption are targets for NASA's Kepler
spacecraft, which launched in March on a quest to search for small
terrestrial planets in roughly one-year orbits around other stars. These kinds
of planets may be our best chance at finding habitable worlds beyond the solar
system.

The adopt-a-star program, called the Pale Blue Dot project,
is run by a non-profit organization that is not affiliated with or endorsed by
NASA. So far, Pale Blue Dot has raised about $10,000 to fund the Kepler
Asteroseismic Science Consortium, a project to measure the absolute sizes of
the stars on Kepler's target list. This endeavor is separate from Kepler's main
mission to hunt for planets, and is not covered by the mission's $600 million
NASA budget.

"The method that Kepler uses to detect planets around
other stars only tells you the size of the planet
compared to star," said Travis Metcalfe, an astronomer at the National
Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado who leads the adoption project.
"Our group measures the size of the star."

Using data from Kepler as well as ground-based telescopes,
the consortium plans to analyze small oscillations in the stars' light to
determine the stars' densities, masses and radii. The astronomers can use this
information to calculate the absolute sizes of any planets around the stars, as
well as the stars' ages, chemical compositions and rotation rates.

"We are a group of international collaborators who are
contributing to the Kepler mission, but we're not funded by NASA,"
Metcalfe told SPACE.com. "The Pale Blue Dot project is part fund-raising,
part educational outreach."

When someone adopts a star, it is tagged with the sponsor's
name, both in Google Sky and in a text version of the catalog. The program
makes sure that no two people can adopt the same star.

"We wanted to distinguish ourselves from the phony
name-a-star companies," Metcalfe said. "We also wanted to
undercut their prices."

Many companies claim to sell a chance to name a star, but
these are gimmicks. Only the International Astronomical Union (IAU) can bestow
official names on celestial objects, and most stars only get numbers, not
names. Those naming rights are not sold.

A NASA statement further clarifies, "Any names given to
stars through this venture (or planets found) will NOT be recognized either by
NASA, the Kepler project or the International Astronomical Union."